Paper Books vs. eBooks

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Mon Aug 30 11:16:02 EDT 2004


I've published several books under both formats, and both have 
advantages and disadvantages. eBooks are great for reference and quick 
lookup, indexing, cross-reference and transportability - I have several 
thousand pages of reference on my laptop, great while at a client site. 
However, screen resolution is lousy (~72 to 133 dpi vs. 3500 for print) 
and tires the eyes pretty quickly. Books meant for one thorough 
read-through and thoughtful review ("The Pragmatic Programmer" or 
Strunk & White's "Elements of Style") are best read in a comfy chair 
with good light. Looking up the nuances of a command are ideal for the 
computer. Reading Tufte's incredible books shows the power of 
typography and layout.

Both have their place, I think.

I suspect a lot of the "trade paperback" books for the computer 
industry will go eBook only, because of their short shelf life and use 
as reference rather than long reads.

OTOH, I offer my clients the complete manual to my vertical niche 
software package as PDFs; every office I have been to has printed out 
the book and drilled it for a looseleaf binder. I suspect that we 
computer geeks are a fairly bias sample set.

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com
On Aug 30, 2004, at 8:57 AM, Fred wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 23:21, bscott at ntisys.com wrote:
>>   As a counter-point...
> ...
>>   We are witnessing the beginning of the end of an era.  Printed 
>> media is
>> becoming obsolete.  It will like tens, if not hundreds, of years to 
>> finish
>> doing so, but the wheel has begun to turn.  How appropriate that 
>> Gutenberg
>> bracket both the beginning[1] and the end[2].
>>
>> [1] http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/homepage.html
>> [2] http://www.gutenberg.net/
>
> While there will of course be a surge of use for e-books and many books
> in the future may only be available in electronic form, I don't see the
> old 'dead tree' books going away completely ever. There is something
> about holding a physical book in your hand, curling up under a shady
> tree to read it, proudly displaying your book collections on shelves in
> you library, etc. I like scanning the shelves of my library for books
> that might spark an answer to a question, or a new idea, or just plain
> old curiosity.
>
> Mind you, e-books do have the wonderful advantage that they will never
> "go out of print" -- they can always be available, and anyone will be
> able to "publish", though we may need a review process to weed out all
> the crud!
>
> I see a place for both. Just as we still have dead-tree newspapers
> despite televised news and online news sites, dead-tree books will
> always be with us despite all the newer ways to publish.
>
> -- 
> Fred -- fred at lrc.puissante.com -- place "[hey]" in your subject.
> There are inflows and outflows -- and you're just a little node.
>
>
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